I’ve been reading through some selected quotes on Rogue Moon from the O’Reilly P2P Conference earlier this month. This comment by Dan Bricklin really clicked with me:

“When you’re designing something, think of how its value will grow with use… It is possible to build systems where additional use and new users bring value to all – and P2P is the key in many cases.” -Dan Bricklin, co-creator of Visicalc, writer, and software designer

Thinking about it, I’m realizing that all the ‘killer apps’ of the last couple of centuries are about building systems whose value increases with use.

Think about Napster or the Web or email… or the Telephone or the automobile or the stock market… or printed money… or printing in general…

…or written history – oral history for that matter…

…or language in general…

They’re all killer apps. They all increase in value with increased use…

And they’re all decentralized P2P apps. I think it’s human nature that’s at work here, and not marketing spins, not eyeball counts, not patents, politics or placation – just our inate need for social interaction, which is necessarily confined by the environment in which we live.

The Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL) works to keep the world’s coral reefs alive and healthy. The site was recently converted to Manila and is edited mainly with Radio Userland. We now have our own news channel and multiple site editors. Go Userland. Go Jake..!..The more y’all hone your product the better my site gets. I love it.

Following up on Dave’s “weird”ness theme of the last couple of days, here’s something from Dr. Dobb’s Journal that I think is weird – A Linux filesystem in a SQL database???:

Dike is currently working on extending the virtual filesystem—hostfs—to allow remote mounting of directories without root permissions on either end. He wants to be able to make non-filesystems on the host look like filesystems on the virtual machine. “As a proof of concept, I’m thinking about dumping a filesystem into a SQL database and booting the virtual machine off the database,” he says. “This might be nothing but a cute trick, but it would have the side-effect of allowing a user inside the virtual machine to do SQL queries on the filesystem to do instantly what would take a long time with utilities like find.”